What is a Meme?

I thought I would open up a category here in my sidebar, for Meme’s ….. What is a Meme you ask?

There are many sites around the internet that have many topics and many interesting ways to create traffic to one’s website.

The concept, I think, is that someone, somewhere, somehow .. decides to create a “Meme Blog” and ask questions on a consistent basis of time. This could be daily, weekly, or any other period of time. Bloggers come and read the questions, then go back to their own blog, answer them .. and then return to the “Meme Blog” a link back to their own blog, where the answers. In theory, if you are interested in this type of thing, it is a way to surf other people’s blogs and others can come surf your blog.

If you do a net search, there are a lot of failed meme blogs out there. With the growing of blogs, a lot of the time some one may try to start something, but either gets tired of this, or there is no traffic and that person stops doing it. I suppose, that’s why the big Meme blogs gets bigger.

In doing net searches for “lists” or directories of this, two sites seem to keep popping up …

What is a meme?
People often ask, “What is a Meme?” so here’s a more than a little information on that. I pronounce it so it’s rhymes with dream; some pronounce it so it sounds like mem (from mem-ory).
In the context of web logs / ‘blogs / blogging and other kinds of personal web sites it’s some kind of list of questions that you saw somewhere else and you decided to answer the questions. Then someone else sees them and does them and so on and so on. I generally consider these to be actual questions and not some multiple choice quizzes that determine some result at the end (what color you are most like, what cartoon character are you, what 80s movie are you).

By some other definitions memes are viral and propagate around sometimes mutating as they propagate. Someone proposed something along the lines of some blog posts are viral, they write about something they see on one blog and the next person does the same sometimes their interpretation varies slightly changing the story (I cannot find this original reference).

Eventually some people decided they were going to creating weekly questionnaires (memes) and post them every week. Some are monthly, a few are daily and some are always there. Some suggest that you get five other people to do the same meme and they have to get five people (and so on), which sometimes increases their propagation. This probably stunts their mutated growth, having a permanent storage place where people go to find them but many people copy them from the site where they see it and they’ll still change a bit.

Personally I liked these sites; sometimes they give me things to write about that I would have never started the topic on my own. So I started collecting them here at The Daily Meme thedailymeme.com/.

Other information from around the web
A meme is:
An idea that, like a gene, can replicate and evolve.
A unit of cultural information that represents a basic idea that can be transferred from one individual to another, and subjected to mutation, crossover and adaptation.
A cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behavior) that is passed from one generation to another by nongenetic means (as by imitation); “memes are the cultural counterpart of genes”…. (continued)